Tuesday, July 24, 2012

More on Nazism and the Brotherhood

When we think about the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East and the Obama administration's bolstering of that movement, particularly in Egypt, it is helpful to know some history of the Brotherhood and its connection to Nazi ideology.

As I have mentioned many times on this blog Matthias Küntzel (author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11) is among the foremost scholars working on this question. Below is a bit of a 2008 interview (pdf) which should be required reading for anyone who intends to form an opinion on the Brotherhood:

Bridges between early Islamism and late Nazism

Alan Johnson: In your book you show that from the 1930s to the mid 1940s there was a growth of ‘personal contacts and ideological affinities between early Islamism and late Nazism.’ Let’s talk about two people who acted as bridges between an older, doctrinal or Koranic anti-Judaism and a modern political and Islamist antiSemitism, influenced by Nazism: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. First, who was Haj Amin al-Husseini and what was his central achievement?

The first thing to understand, and it is virtually never mentioned in the mass media, is the "personal contacts and ideological affinities between early Islamism and late Nazism."

This is a key point that must be addressed because we need to know just who these people are that the Obama administration is helping into power in Egypt. The fact of the matter, however much they may pose as "moderate" for a gullible western audience, is that the Brotherhood is a fascist movement, heavily influenced by European fascism of the early-middle twentieth century.

Matthias Küntzel: The main achievement of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was to combine the Jew-hatred of ancient Islam with modern antiSemitism into a new and persuasive rhetoric. I discovered a speech he gave in 1937 with the title, ‘Jewry and Islam.’ Here, he intermingled modern anti-Semitism the stories of very early Islam, going back and forth from the 7th and the 20th centuries, and connecting both kinds of Jew-hatred. This was something new.

So the Mufti, who is the father of Palestinian nationalism, merged early Islamic Jew Hatred with the Nazi variety during the 1930s.

When Churchill visited Jerusalem in March 1921, just before the British Mandate, he was given a petition by the then Palestinian leadership which was very antisemitic. But it was a purely European anti-Semitism – about the alleged Jewish responsibility for the First World War, about how later Jews incited the Russian Revolution and so on. It was ridiculous and no Muslim of that time would have been able to understand any of this, because it was really a précis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion! This was not the way to mobilise the Arab masses. It was the Mufti who realised this. He was always a special case in this regard. High ranking Muslims at this time rarely wanted to mobilise masses, but Haj Amin al-Husseini
did. Indeed it was a mass mobilisation that in 1921 led to his appointment as Mufti,against other Jerusalem notables.

The Mufti combined Nazi anti-Semitism with traditional Islamic Jew Hatred and used both to "mobilize the masses" in the 1920s. It was the Arab riots and revolts throughout the 1920s and 1930s that led the British to issue the infamous White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to mandated Palestine directly during the Holocaust.

Here was a modern feature – the mobilisation of masses to rescue your position. To this end he invented a form of Islamic anti-Semitism which was able to reach the illiterate masses by recruiting their religious feelings and by repeating the antiJewish verses from the Koran and Hadith again and again. Thus, we find for the first time in about 100 years the famous Hadith about the stones and the trees that want to kill Jews – a Hadith which constitutes today a part of the Hamas Charter – mentioned in the Mufti’s speech of 1937.

The Mufti was the most important founder of modern Islamic anti-Semitism and this achievement – with all its after-effects – is more important than his role during the Nazi time. Amin el-Husseini is often reduced to this time. But I think that what he did before and after this period of time was much more important. Before, he created the new antisemitic rhetoric, the rhetoric the Islamists would spread. Between 1946 and 1948, he played a key role in mobilising the Arab world against Israel. Sometimes individuals can change a lot, and the Mufti was by far the best-known representative of the Muslim world at that time, among other things because of his broadcasting of pro-Nazi and antisemitic sermons into the Middle East during the war over the Berlin short wave transmitter. He pursued his passion after May 8, 1945 and stirred up a specifically antisemitic hatred against the Jews in Palestine and Israel.

There is much more to this interview and I very much recommend that it be read in full. I may continue this little exercise going forward, but for the moment the purpose is simply to point out... to insist, really... that the Muslim Brotherhood has historical connections to Nazi ideology and that we must bare this in mind when we consider the US-Brotherhood connection under the Obama administration.

The point, it should be understood, is not that Barack Obama intends to support an Islamic variant of fascism in today's Middle East. I have to go on the assumption that he has no such intention. Instead there are two possible explanations for Obama's behavior, ignorance and / or the sincere belief that either the Brotherhood has moderated itself or that bringing it into power will serve to moderate it.

Sometimes pundits will say that the Muslim Brotherhood has given up on the violent Jihad with the obvious implication being that there is nothing to fear from them. If that is the case, however, how is it that the Brotherhood calls for a renewed Caliphate with Jerusalem as its capital?

One of my foremost criticisms of the progressive-left, and particularly the Jewish left, is their insensibility concerning the rise of radical Islam. They are almost entirely incapable of discussing what is perhaps the foremost international political development of our time for reasons that amount to social cowardice.

This makes standard progressive-left, including standard "progressive Zionist," opinions on the Arab-Israel conflict almost entirely worthless because they fail to take into account the fact that it is radical Islam, itself, which is driving the conflict. The reason that there is no peace is not because Jews are building housing for themselves in Judea, but because the Arab world absolutely refuses to allow Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land and they do so for religious reasons.